CES 2012 is getting ready to start in Las Vegas and as always the city is going to be filled with lots of promotions and ads for the tech companies that are exhibiting at the Las Vegas Convention Center and other locations. Today, Nokia is giving people who are flying in to Las Vega's airport a nice freebie while also promoting the heck out of their Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

Microsoft's Ben Lower, who works on the Microsoft Phone time, posted a Twitter message on Saturday announcing that Nokia is offering free rides from the airport to the Aria, Venetian, and Bellagio hotels on the Strip in a double decker bus. As you can see from the image, the people who decorated the bus know where they are located with the phrase "Go Topless in Vegas." In any case, people going to those hotels have a nice way to avoid paying for cab fare thanks to Nokia.

Lower also said that Nokia is giving free demos of their Lumia smartphones to the people who get the free bus rides. He doesn't say which phone they are showing off. The first Nokia Lumia phone to be released in the US, the Lumia 710, will be launched via T-Mobile later this coming week. Nokia is expected to officially reveal the Lumia 900 at their CES 2012 press event.

Samsung, HTC and other Android vendors are no longer innovating on the hardware look and feel of their phones. The conventional wisdom says consumers no longer care about that. Is it possible this has created an opening for a new design to carve a niche? The timing for the Lumia 900 debut in the US market just might be right. Handsets have never looked this boring, not since the pre-1994 era of whip antenna bricks before the [url=http://www.forbes.com/companies/nokia/]Nokia 2100 changed the dynamics[/url] of phone design.

When Volkswagen debuted the New Beetle in 1998, there was skepticism about its success in the US market. The car was basically a reskinned VW Golf with little storage space and some fairly serious quality issues with transmission and windows. Its European vibe was considered possibly too weird for America. Of course, it became a hit – unusual, quirky design was a big selling point at the time when the US car industry was dominated by cautious clones. Later, the offbeat approach was copied with gusto by Chrysler and others.

Nokia announced its first major high-end device for the US market on Monday – and the Lumia 900 will basically have to duplicate the New Beetle trick in order to make an impact. This is a single-core phone competing against the new dual-core beasts of Samsung and HTC. It has a regular 4.3 inch display instead of the 4.6 to 5 inch jumbo screens debuted by the Asian Android vendors. It has two good cameras, but they does not hit the 16 MP level of the latest HTC.

The two advantages the Lumia 900 possesses are a new silhouette and an original user interface. Compared with the army of Android models AT&T announced, the Lumia hardware pops out. The cyan version features a glass block slightly elevated from a bright blue chassis, contrasting sharply with the Samsung-Motorola-HTC-LG-Pantech monoblock look. It’s no coincidence Nokia opted to use the blue Lumia in its Monday presentation. That’s the approach Volkswagen used in its New Beetle ads that often featured neon colors to underline the quirky design.

There are two obvious obstacles here. First – American consumers have not created a big handset hit based on a novel design since the iPhone debuted in 2007. Obviously, you can argue that the iPhone success hinged more on software than the new engineering approach. The days when the hardware design alone could create a bestseller seem to be long gone – before the iPhone, Motorola RAZR in 2004 was arguably the last of the smash hits created by a new shape.

But the entire new Android phone wave – and the latest iPhone – are built on the bet that consumers now only focus on software and what is under the hood. Siri, dual-core processors, better camera quality – it’s all internal now.

Or is it? Could the fact that so many vendors have decided to go with old designs this winter open the door for a new competitor that introduces new hardware design combined with a novel UI? The latest Windows OS does not offer ground-breaking innovations – but there are small, interesting touches such as the way the application icons convey a stream of real-time information.

The challenge of getting US consumers to sample Lumia 900 is aided by how boring the new wave of Android models look despite their awesome specifications. But the challenge of getting consumers to abandon the Apple and Android ecosystems is something no car company has had to wrestle with. Apple’s grip on its consumers is likely unbreakable – those people are gone. But Android just might be a different kettle of fish.

A research firm called NPD shocked the mobile telecom world earlier this week when it presented a radical shift in US smartphone market share in the October/November period. According to NPD, Android OS lost a shocking 13 percentage points of US smartphone market share between 3Q11 and the pre-Christmas season. At the same time, Apple soared. This dovetails with the profound smartphone weakness that struck HTC and Motorola during 4Q11. Despite the strong Android activation numbers recently reported by Google, Android’s triumphant run in the US smartphone market may be already over.

This week’s US media coverage of the Lumia 900 has been surprisingly positive, from Daily Beast and Time to the curmudgeons of PC World and PC Magazine. American media is is bored with the Apple/Android narrative, ready to write contrarian pieces about a surprise comeback of Windows. True comeback in North America may be out of reach for Nokia. But I would not count out the possibility of surprisingly strong early showing for Lumia 900 as US taste-makers flirt with deserting the grimly predictable Android camp this spring.

Did the "next few months" announcement from the unveiling of the Nokia Lumia 900 leave you wanting? Perhaps a March 18th pronouncement will sate your own personal gadget knowledgebase. That's the date being tossed around by Windows gurus Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, who joined forces on TWiT to discuss the presence of a March date in the latest Nokia developer newsletter. But that wasn't good enough for Paul, who said the specific date is March 18. Go ahead and mark your calendars, but we'd recommend you use pencil -- just to be safe.

Nokia Siemens Networks has found a buyer for another bit of its business. The vendor announced today that it sold a line of proprietary fixed-wireless access products to privately held Spanish technology company CN Tetragen for an undisclosed sum. The product portfolio is the Expedience range of indoor and outdoor customer premises equipment (CPE), base stations and management technology that operates in the 2.5GHz, 3.3GHz, 3.5GHz and 3.7GHz frequency bands, which NSN had acquired as part of its deal to buy Motorola Solutions in April 2011. The vendor said that about 15,000 Expedience base stations and 700,000 CPEs had been sold to date. Like its WiMax business -- which NSN also acquired from Motorola and is in the process of selling to NewNet -- the unit was not part of NSN's mobile broadband portfolio. (See NSN Sells Fixed-Wireless Biz, NSN to Sell WiMax Biz and NSN Finally Seals $975M Moto Deal.)

Separately, NSN appears to have won a five-year managed services deal with Russian giant VimpelCom Ltd. (NYSE: VIP), reports Bloomberg. The deal covers maintenance and support of fixed and mobile networks in central Russia.

Deutsche Telekom has been trumpeting its researchers' role in what it claims is the breaking of a data-transmission speed record. T-Labs boffins, in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and Telekom Network Production staff, achieved a 512Gbit/s transmission over a single optical-fiber wavelength channel on signals sent over a distance of 734 km. This, says DT, equates to a usable bit rate of 400 Gbit/s. (See AlcaLu Unveils 400G Chip .)

BT has clinched a five-year, £30 million (US$47 million) managed services deal with Standard Life, a U.K. savings and investments firm. The deal covers the delivery and management of a BT Connect Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN), as well as VoIP and contact centers, among other areas. Today also sees the launch of BT's new Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) tools, which form part of the BT Connect portfolio and offer enterprises, says the operator, a better snapshot of how well their network services are performing. (See BT: CIOs Need Smarter Network Tools.)

Don Shrock, head of Qualcomm's chipset division, says his company is intent on minimizing the Finnish company's market share. "You're either with us or you're against us," says Mr. Shrock. "We're going to keep the pressure on folks who don't use our chips."

EricL stated:

Hard to figure how these two firms are seen by anyone as direct competitors, but the nutball fringe evidently see it that way.

Nokia is far and away the most successful handset manufacturer ever and is emerging as a strong # 2 to Ericsson in infrastructure.

Qualcomm couldn't hack it in either infra or handsets, but Don Shrock who is about to head off down the primrose lane says:

"We're going to keep the pressure on folks who don't use our chips."

It appears to me that those folks who don't use Qualcomm chips like Nokia and Samsung are putting the pressure on Qualcomm.

Wow... There is wrong.. and then there is REALLY, REALLY WRONG!

No wonder those on the NOK Moderated Stream are so BITTER, and have surrounded themselves in their own autocratic euroserf sandboxs.